


give me hope in the darkness (and i will see the light)

by alemantele (falcine)



Series: like father like son [3]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Gen, Implied/Referenced Incest, Star Wars: The Last Jedi Spoilers, You Have Been Warned, the gist is accidental incest what if luke is ben's father
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-18
Updated: 2017-12-18
Packaged: 2019-02-16 18:19:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,039
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13059513
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/falcine/pseuds/alemantele
Summary: Every time Ben calls him ‘uncle,’ Luke flinches back.Nowadays, he calls his uncle just Luke, and it feels like a bandage slapped onto a raw wound.Luke tries to train Ben. It doesn't go well.





	give me hope in the darkness (and i will see the light)

**Author's Note:**

> I can't get away from this monster AU

The first time Luke wanted to kill him, Ben was still red-faced and small, fitting into Luke’s arms all too perfectly.

Ben had wailed, loud and piercing, and Luke had rocked him back and forth without a second’s thought, thinking, desperately,  _ no, stop, be quiet, it’s okay.  _ Wanting—wanting him happy, calm, safe—wanting him stilled, gone, wiped away as if he had never existed. But even then, Luke had felt the spark of the force nestled in Ben’s chest, and it shone fiercer than the twinkling stars outside.

_ I love you,  _ Luke had thought, and hated himself a little for it.

Then, Leia bustled back into the room, took one look at them—Ben crying, Luke hapless—and rolled her eyes. “You’re not very good at this, are you?”

Luke laughed. The madness passed. “No,” he admitted, passing baby Ben back to his mother and drawing his hands back to himself. “I’m really not.”

 

* * *

 

It doesn’t take much to keep away, keep himself busy rebuilding, take longer and longer trips to more and more remote parts of the galaxy. Luke tells himself it’s for the best, after all. For all of them.

But then Leia calls, around the chaos of sparks and another half-blown-up ship, Ben sniffling just out of view, and says,  _ please, Luke, he needs someone to show him. He needs a teacher. _

And then Ben is here, lanky and awkward, just starting to grow into his bones. He steps off the ship behind his mother, mouth pressed into a hard line. He gives Luke a sullen, squinty eyed stare and straightens to the full extent of his eight-year-old height, even as he stays just a half pace behind Leia.

Luke tries to hold himself back at a distance, but—the rushing, rising tide of love comes sweeping back, deep and fathomless, so fierce and strong it nearly bowls him over.

“Hey, Ben,” he says, pulling his lips into a trembling smile.

Ben does not smile back. But he unknits his brow, allows his mother to guide him forward, and, eventually, he follows Luke back to the Academy.

He tries to tell himself this is not a mistake, even when later that night, he finds himself hovering by Ben’s dorm, watching his small chest rise and fall under the faint glow of moonlight, mesmerized.

 

* * *

 

By the time Ben gets to the Academy, he knows his Uncle Luke more from whispered stories and HoloNet broadcasts than his own memories.

The man standing in front of him almost looks like Luke Skywalker, but not quite. He is a little shorter, his hair a touch too dark, his cheeks a little fuller and the bags under his eyes a little heavier. He looks like a real person. Ben chews on the inside of his cheek, peering up at his uncle. He looks like a stranger.

Luke reaches out, and despite himself, Ben flinches back, too used to seeing a facsimile of that hand pushing out with the force, banishing enemies left and right on the cheesy rebellion era dramas that used to play in the background every evening while his parents bustled about. Luke notices. He lets his hand sag in the air between them, instead, and his grin turns a little lopsided.

“Sorry,” he mutters, talking not so much to Ben as to himself, something complicated and confusing stitched in the lines of his face.

The tense knot in Ben’s stomach twists. Luke looks at him the way mom always does when she catches him floating rocks in his room, or when she screamed herself hoarse the first time she caught him talking to ghosts, or when she’s frowning at the latest ship he’s accidentally blown up. The look that makes Ben feel small and sorry, but also the look that tells him the hard line of her mouth will break into a smile and she’ll come gather him up in a tight hug, whisper  _ oh, Ben,  _ and the whole thing will be forgotten soon enough.

Uncle Luke doesn’t gather him in a hug. He only tucks his hand away behind his back, then tilts his head as if to beckon Ben to follow. “C’mon, kid,” he says, though the tight lines around his eyes don’t loosen. “I got a lot to show you.”

He turns. Ben follows. The sun sets and drags the heavy shadow of Luke Skywalker over the both of them.

Uncle Luke keeps a careful distance, so all Ben is left with is that look, nothing else.

As they walk, Ben watches his uncle’s retreating back and feels very small and sorry.

 

* * *

 

The second time Luke nearly kills him, Ben is twelve years old and too strong in the force for anyone to do anything about it. This time, it is an accident, through and through, though some part of Luke will always wonder if the dark flash of malicious intent hadn’t buried itself in him well and properly that day.

The day is bright and beautiful, and Luke takes his class out to mediate under the shining sun.

Ben wanders away from the pack and settles himself under a cool patch of bushes. Luke’s first instinct is to herd him back, but Ben perches on the edge of a rock and sits with such straight-spined purpose and scrunches his face up in such sincerity that something inside Luke wilts.

He hangs back instead, shooting occasional glances back at his gaggle of Jedi-in-training to make sure they’re using the breathing exercises he taught them earlier in the day. But mostly Luke stares at Ben.

Bit by bit, Ben’s face relaxes. He exhales, and the slope of his small shoulders deepens. Luke feels the ebb and flow, Ben’s force pushing at him like a wave gently touching on shore.

_ What are you seeing?  _ Luke wants to ask him. Even against the light of the red giant sun, Ben shines brighter than anything else. Impossible to tell if it is the force, singing through him like a taut wire, or else Luke’s own desperate, shameful love, feeding into an endless, looping circuit.

But then, Ben frowns, and Luke has half a second of warning before they both feel the same flash of the dark, something sinister slicing through the calm waters.

Ben’s eyes fly open. “Get out,” he whispers, his hands going to his ears. “No, no, not here, get  _ out _ .”

The ground starts to rumble. Wind picks up, licking around Ben too fast, cocooning him in dust.

And then, as trees start to fall and branches collapse, Ben lets out a guttural, heart-wrenching scream and falls to his knees. Luke rushes forward, trying to cut through the thick miasma of the dark, so sudden but so overwhelming, blanketing them like snowfall.

_ No, no, stop, be quiet,  _ he thinks to himself, pushing through the buffet of wind and force and whipping branches,  _ it’s okay, Ben, stop this. _

When a jagged branch reaches out of the mess and cuts a long streak down his cheek, he reaches out with the force and tries to clear the air around himself, at least, but the wind only presses in harder.

“Ben!” he shouts, even though Ben is still screaming, a high pitched wail that somehow carries even over the roar of the debris. “Ben!” he shouts anyways.

The storm only picks up speed.

Gritting his teeth, Luke claps his hands together, and slams a long, arcing cut through it all. Something cracks. Bits of rock fly up. Luke reaches out and grabs the wild, untamed force-energy, and wrenches it back into submission within the boundaries of the trees, the rocks, the ground.

He nearly runs into whatever it is that showed its ugly face, that dark presence, slimy and slick, but before he can strangle it, it is gone, slithering away through the cracks in the universe, dissipated. The wind dies, too, and Ben’s voice chokes out.

When the air clears, Ben is staring down, wide-eyed, at the crack in the rock. It misses him by a hair. The ends of his robes are frayed. The rock itself is cleaved in half. He turns his gaze back up at Luke, skittish and wild, and it’s all Luke can do to stop himself from crossing the space between them in two bounds and holding Ben until the raw fear in his eyes disappears.

But he keeps his hands to himself, holds them tight against his side, wonders how close they came to splitting Ben in half along with the rest of that rock.

The same question is in Ben’s eyes. He looks back down to the deep crack, then up to Luke, and finally clenches his jaw and scrambles off the rock and away.

 

* * *

 

Every time Ben calls him ‘uncle,’ Luke flinches back. Not always visibly, but there is always some sort of lurch between them, a flicker of uncertainty, as obvious as a rock dropped into a mirror-still pond. Ben used to pester him with it, slipping in chirps of  _ uncle Luke!  _ every morning, just to see Luke’s smile wither.

Nowadays, he calls his uncle just Luke, and it feels like a bandage slapped onto a raw wound.

Late at night, he curls on his side under his scratchy blankets and wonders what his parents are doing. He imagines the three of them—mom, dad, uncle Luke—from those old dramas, laughing and smiling like they hadn’t a care in the world, and wonders what the truth was like.

The air is cold, brittle. Ben’s breath crystallizes like a cloud in front of him, and when he closes his eyes, all he can see is a vast, unending cavern, opening up beneath him.

And then a voice, whispering.

He jerks himself awake with a shudder, eyes wide until they burn.  _ No, no,  _ he thinks,  _ stop, go away.  _ Still, the cavern calls, growing vines, threatening to pull him through.

He tears the blankets off and runs out into the night, shuddering in the cold.

Eventually, he finds himself at the foot of uncle Luke’s bed.

“Luke,” he whispers, reaching out with a shaking hand. “I...wake up, please.”

Uncle Luke stirs. “Ben?” he mumbles, turning and scrabbling at the air. “What’s wrong?”

“I had a dream,” Ben says, too aware that he’s not young enough to do this anymore. But the voice, and the cavern, they all suck at him like a black hole, cold and terrifying. Ben blinks, once, and his cheeks at wet now. “I don’t want to go back to sleep.”

With a bleary squint, his uncle Luke sits up and reaches out to grab Ben solidly by the shoulder.

They both stop short, something electric slick between Luke’s hand and Ben’s shaking arm.

“Uncle Luke?” Ben asks, his voice barely a whisper.

For a moment, he thinks his uncle will tug him close, let him confess all the horrible things the scratching, wretched voice has whispered in Ben’s ear. It’s been so long since anyone’s opened their arms to him, and Ben is old enough to not need it anymore, but the feeling of uncle Luke’s hand on his shoulder, solid, reassuring—it’s enough to make him want it.

But Luke only gives him a wan smile. He unlocks his fingers, lifts the hand, pulls his own blankets off and hops off the bed. “How ‘bout we go down to the lake and I’ll teach you how to keep those nightmare away?”

Ben hugs his own arms around himself. “Okay.”

“You alright, kid?”

Ben nods, presses his trembling lips into a tight line, and locks all that starving want deep inside himself.

 

* * *

 

The last time Luke tries to kill Ben, he nearly succeeds.

Here is the story: it is night, he feels some deep, resonant disturbance in the force, and comes to Ben to find him in the midst of nightmares again. He looks and see the cavern, hears the deep, rasping voice that emanates from Ben’s mind, feels the hot lick of flames in both their futures.

Much, much later, Rey will ask:  _ did you create Kylo Ren? _

_ Yes,  _ Luke will think,  _ I did, but not the way you think. _

 

* * *

 

When Ben wakes up to his uncle Luke and a glowing lightsaber, he isn’t surprised.


End file.
